Scott Bostwick, pastor of St. Paul's United Methodist Church in Bay Head, points to the line where the waters reached. / Thomas P. Costello/Staff photographer

Water-damaged furniture is set along the curb outside the parsonage at St. Paul's United Methodist Church in Bay Head on Thursday. / THOMAS P. COSTELLO/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

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BAY HEAD — Scott Bostwick had no illusions about what awaited him as he walked up to his front door Thursday afternoon.

Bostwick, pastor of Saint Paul’s United Methodist Church, lives with his family at the church parsonage on Park Avenue.

Reached by telephone as he made his way to his front door, Bostwick said, “As I’m coming up to the door, just looking around me, I know there’s going to be loss, there’s going to be damage — but still I’m thinking that we’re fortunate and blessed compared to people just two blocks up.”

Bostwick gasped as he entered his house. “The smell is overwhelming,” he said. “There’s about a quarter-inch of silt or mud over all the floors,” he said.

“The carpet is squishy. It looks like you could write your name in the mud on the linoleum.”

“It looks like a wave came through, the way everything is laying,” he said. “End tables are pushed over, a closet door is open. There’s just a lot ...”

But then he brightened up.

“It kind of looks like my kids were in here and played with everything, and then just left it all over the room,” he said, laughing. “So I’m used to how this looks.”

Bostwick, his wife, two young children and their dog had evacuated Sunday afternoon, going to his brother’s house in West Long Branch, he said.

His home is uninhabitable, he said, so he would probably sleep at his church while his family returns to his brother’s West Long Branch home, or goes to stay with his mother-in-law in Linwood, Atlantic County.

Along with taking care of his family, Bostwick said he’s also concerned about his neighbors.

“I’m not too worried about us because I know we’ll bounce back from this,” he said. “I know as I walk a couple blocks east there are persons whose homes just aren’t there anymore. So when I look and assess what I have here, it’s a bump in the road, and for a month or two months, we’re not going to be able to live here.

“As for now, it’s really focusing on the immediate needs of folks in the neighborhood, what do we do to rebuild the neighborhood and what can we do for the folks who have lost everything,” he said.